The Children of Hurin

The Children of Hurin, a new full-length novel by JRR Tolkien, was released on April 17, 2007.

The Children of Hurin is the first full-length, cohesive novel of Tolkien’s created world of Middle-earth since the publication of The Silmarillion in 1977.

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Professor Tolkien’s son Christopher Tolkien, who has edited and collected most of Tolkien’s posthumous writings, has spent the last thirty years finishing his father’s incomplete tale of Turin Turambar and the other offspring of Hurin of the house of Hador.

The Lay of the Children of Hurin was one of the three great tales of the First Age of Middle-earth – along with the tales of Beren & Luthien and Tuor and the Downfall of Gondolin - which Tolkien first began work on in 1918 and never completely finished.

Nonetheless, The Children of Hurin was the most complete manuscript of that bunch, and Christopher Tolkien has set himself to finishing what his father had begun.

The text will likely seem familiar to readers of some of Tolkien’s other posthumously published books, especially The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The Lays of Beleriand.

Fragments of story and verse have appeared in each of these publications, in greater or lesser degrees of completeness and detail. The most complete of these tales was the “Narn I Chin Hurin”, an 80+ page rendering of the tale in Unfinished Tales.

The Children of Hurin gives a complete account of the tales of Tolkien’s tragic hero, Turin Turambar, his sister Nienor, and the rest of his cursed family.

The tale will likely seem a very dark one to readers of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

For one, there are no hobbits in this book. This story takes place long before their time.

For another, Turin’s tale is a very sad one full of misfortunes and travails. Turin’s father, Hurin, is captured by Morgoth, the Dark Lord, in the Nirnaeth Arnoediad ("Battle of Unnumbered Tears"). When he will not give Morgoth the information he demands, Morgoth sets a curse upon his bloodline. Thus, though Turin is a great warrior and of the bloodline of great heroes, everything he does turns to ill.

Many scholars have noted the similarities between the tales of Turin and his misfortunes and the Kalevala of Finnish myth, a collection of tales that Tolkien was intimately familiar with.

This new release of The Children of Hurin appears with a new map by Christopher Tolkien and new cover and interior artwork by Alan Lee. The US cover illustration can be seen on this page.

Christopher Tolkien’s role in the completion of this new novel is stated to be of an editorial nature only. According to an interview with Christopher Tolkien’s son Adam by the Spanish Tolkien Society :

"The Children of Hurin is entirely in the author’s words – apart from some very minor reworkings of a grammatical and stylistic nature"

Aside from the hardcover editions the publishers have released a beautiful Collector's Edition of The Children of Hurin with a slipcover. You can place orders for these books through the Tolkien Online bookstore.

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A Germanic Tragedy 
I have just finished reading The Children of Hurin. This is one of the few Tolkien works which gives a deep psychological portrait, within the limitations ...

The Silmarillion and The Children of Hurin: Substantial Worries 
I’m from Argentina, and I’m nineteen years old. My worry about The Silmarillion and The Children of Húrin is that in the prologues of both books Tolkien’...

Review - The Children of Hurin 
I am a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien from my teen years, when I first read The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings, so when I saw The Children of Hurin sitting in a ...